Over the years, cyberattacks have grown in magnitude and complexity, posing a considerable risk to businesses and organizations alike. Hackers are always out to harvest all manner of data: from usernames and passwords to social security numbers and PIN codes. Giant corporations haven’t been spared either. Driven by monetary gain, hackers infiltrate large companies and small businesses alike intending to steal confidential information such as customer and company data. In its wake, a cyber-attack can leave a trail of destruction as the hacked companies are left to deal with astronomical losses running into millions of dollars in litigation and compensation of victims. An organization’s image is also called into question, and this usually marks the beginning of the end of the organization’s success as clients generally opt to seek their services elsewhere where they feel that their data is safe.
With the enormous risks associated with cyber-attacks, the Federal government prioritized the security of businesses and their customers. In December 2015, the Department of Defence (DoD) formulated a set of regulations called the DFARS. This is short for the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. DFARS compliance is mandatory and equally crucial for any business or entity that is seeking to do business with the government, and for good reasons – to protect the Federal government’s data that is stored, processed or conveyed within a contractor’s internal network.
The deadline for compliance has since passed – December 2017- and any contractors must now be fully compliant before engaging the DoD in any business. Let’s briefly discuss the minimum requirements for DFARS.
Requirements for minimum compliance
Despite the complexities in ensuring data security, DoD has made some reasonable minimum requirements for all contractors. Let’s have an overview at some of them:
- To put in place adequate measures to protect data belonging to DoD that either resides or transits through their internal networks from disclosure or unauthorized access.
- To promptly report any cases of cyber attacks or breaches and cooperate with DoD in responding to these incidences. This includes guaranteeing affected media and providing forensics.
- Upon discovery of malicious software the contractors should hand the malicious software over to the DoD cybercrime center for further analysis.
How can your business attain these standards?
As a business, meeting all the compliance requirements in safeguarding data from DoD from breaches and disclosure can be a challenge. You will need to outsource some experts to help you with compliance.
And this is where we come in. TCB security experts and consultants will help you conduct a gap analysis. This is the first step in compliance and determines how close or far away your company is at meeting the minimum requirements. We will help your business discover which parts or sections of your business haven’t met the requirements. From there, we will recommend what needs to be implemented in terms of the hardware, and software such as intrusion detection and prevention systems to ward off infiltration or compromise of data.
We will advise on the database security controls to implement, file integrity checking, and logging techniques to use. We will also go out of your way and conduct penetration tests and vulnerability assessments to ensure that your data is always safe from prying eyes. This will go a long way in alleviating the hustle and agony of setting up everything by yourself and end up wasting time and energy and spending more than you should. Contact us today and let us know how we may be of assistance.